[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

( ), the resident engineer from the DOT, North Carolina Department of
Transportation, and we are in his office at Forks of Ivy. Stan, could
you just maybe introduce yourself? I basically want to do a sound-check
and make sure that we're getting everything okay.

STAN HYATT:

Okay, well it's good to have you here, Rob. I am Stan Hyatt, resident
engineer over this I-26 project here in Madison County. [Recorder is turned off and then back on].

ROB AMBERG:

Stan, how long have you worked with DOT?

STAN HYATT:

I started working in the summers while I was going to college, in 1967.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow. And what is your age, if you don't mind my asking?

STAN HYATT:

Fifty-four.

ROB AMBERG:

Fifty-four? Okay, well I'll be fifty-three next month, so we're right on
target here. Same generation. Did you go to NC State?

STAN HYATT:

No, I ended up going to Ohio University. We moved away from here when I
was a teenager. My dad was living in Ohio—in Cleveland, Ohio—and ended
up going to Ohio University.

ROB AMBERG:

I went to University of Dayton, so there's another point of contact
there. We were probably in school about the same time, I'd say. But you
grew up in this area.

STAN HYATT:

Yes.

ROB AMBERG:

You were telling me the other day you grew up in Barnardsville?

STAN HYATT:

Yes, Barnardsville, Dillingham area. Just underneath the Blue Ridge
Parkway. North end of Buncombe County.

ROB AMBERG:

Was your family from there? Were your family's roots from that area, too?

STAN HYATT:

Yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

And how long had your family been in the community?

STAN HYATT:

Two generations before me.

ROB AMBERG:

And what kind of work did your dad do?

STAN HYATT:

My dad did a lot of things. The last work he did before he retired in
Cleveland—he worked in a musical instrument factory, making instruments.
Brass instruments.

ROB AMBERG:

But what did he do when you were in Barnardsville?

STAN HYATT:

He did a lot of things. He just moved around from job to job. One of the
last things he did in Barnardsville was work with his brother in a
country store.

ROB AMBERG:

Was there farming in your background at all?

STAN HYATT:

My grandmother had farmland and leased it out, and I helped with the
tobacco chores and gardening and growing corn. Things like that—feeding
the pigs and feeding the chickens, milking the cows—when I was growing
up with her.

ROB AMBERG:

So you had all of those things. And would you classify your grandma as
somewhat self-sufficient on the farm?

STAN HYATT:

She was extremely self-sufficient. She lived after she raised six kids of
her own. I lived with her a while, and she would have me go out to the
woods and get roots and things out of the ground that she made medicines
out of. I hunted; I would bring squirrels and fish back, and rabbits. My
grandmother could fix anything. When her husband was still alive she
cooked for a sawmill up there in Dillingham area. She was the most
self-sufficient woman that I ever knew.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow. That's pretty remarkable. So she made her own medicines, then.

STAN HYATT:

Some of them. I'm not saying she made everything, but she had an
understanding, having been raised in the mountains back in the
Depression era days and before, of self-reliance. She lost all that she
had in the Depression. She and her husband had accumulated five or six
thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, and she lost
it all. One day it was in the bank; the next day she went to Asheville
and it was gone.

ROB AMBERG:

So that must have really tested her in terms of her self-sufficiency and
self-reliance.

STAN HYATT:

It did. And about that same time her husband died, and so she had to
raise six kids as a widow woman with no real income except off of the
farm.

ROB AMBERG:

For you growing up, then, as a child and before you all moved to
Cleveland, did you have a sense that this was in a way the perfect
childhood? Or was it something that you felt you wanted to get away
from?

STAN HYATT:

No, I never wanted to get away from Western North Carolina. We were poor,
and I realized we were poor, but it didn't bother me at all. I had the
woods and the creeks, and the mountains to climb. I was the happiest kid
in the world growing up, and had nothing [Laughter] that people—I mean, material things—that people would consider
something today.

ROB AMBERG:

My father-in-law just died—actually this last week—and he was a person I
would have considered—like, this is the person I would like to get lost
with in the woods, if I had to get lost. I'd want my father-in-law with
me, because I knew we'd get along all right. We'd probably live pretty
well, and I'm curious as to whether you had a mentor or someone who taught you about the woods, and taught you about
the farm, and all those kinds of points of self-reliance.

STAN HYATT:

We had family. I had uncles that took me bear hunting and things—fishing,
and to the lakes and things like that—but most of the time I just roamed
on my own. It was nothing when I was eight years old to get on the bus
and go to Asheville, and go to the movies and bring groceries back for
my grandmother or mother. It was nothing for me to take a .22 rifle when
I was just a little kid and get going to the woods, and stay most of the
day. Just have a good time in the woods by myself. So it's a lot of
self-sufficiency there, but there were also adults for guidance in the
family.

ROB AMBERG:

Did you all raise a lot of tobacco?

STAN HYATT:

My grandmother probably had in her allotment a couple acres of tobacco,
which she leased out to people living in that Dillingham area. As I
said, it was a family unit thing. We all pitched in and helped. Even
though it was leased out, it was expected that the kids would help. When
it was time to hoe tobacco, the teenagers got their hoe and got out
there with the people—with the kids of the person leasing the
tobacco—and it was just a family effort.

ROB AMBERG:

Did you have a sense when you were growing up, you know, "Gosh, I'd
really like to farm. I'd like to stay on this place and continue this
lifestyle and be a farmer."?

STAN HYATT:

I wanted to stay in the area and stay on the land, but I didn't ever
really have a strong desire to be a farmer. I loved to garden back then,
and I still garden now—small gardening—but to work on the land all day
long—I realized at an early age it was hard work [Laughs].

ROB AMBERG:

I understand. It took me moving here for that to happen. Actually, did
you ever know a person named Mack Davis, who lived over in Democrat for
a while?

His was the first tobacco I ever worked down there, and then quite a bit
after that, and rapidly learned that I wasn't cut out to farm at all. It
sounds like you learned a lot of that self-reliance, self-sufficiency.
My sense is that this is probably stuff that stayed with you your entire
life.

STAN HYATT:

You're correct about that. It did, and I tried to teach some of that to
our daughters. I think people in this era that we live in are not
self-reliant enough. I don't think people should just be hermits and
hibernate, and go up onto the mountain and live all unto them selves. We
have to live as a society and interact with each other, but I think
there's too much reliance this day and time. People—kids growing up—are
not taught things by their parents. Mothers taught their daughters how
to sew and cook and things like that; dads taught their boys how to farm
and how to make a living of some kind, whatever their trade was. And you
don't see that. People are so busy now, they're not passing down that
self-reliant nature like they had to do to survive in the era before
this time.

No, I have—I looked for land over near the family land. As it turned out,
the land that my dad had went to his brother, and he's presently living
there. After my mother died, that was a necessity. He didn't have the
money to keep the land up himself, so he ended up having to sell it. And
that was before I was working and had the means to purchase land. When
we got out of school, my wife and I—and settled down here—got back off of the highway training program that I
attended one year in Raleigh—we looked for land in that area. We
couldn't find it; even then in the early 70s, land was very high in
Buncombe County. And we found some land in Madison County, and we
purchased it in 1973. Built a home on it in '79, and we're very happy
living there now. So I've actually lived in Madison County for the last
twenty-one years.

ROB AMBERG:

So you're right on the line, then.

STAN HYATT:

Yes.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah. I'm curious, how old are your daughters?

STAN HYATT:

One is sixteen and one twenty.

ROB AMBERG:

And how do they, or how did they respond to this desire on your part and
your wife's part to—for them to think a little bit more self-reliantly?
I've got a twenty-year-old son and a ten-year-old daughter, and of
course they think we're nuts [Laughs]—"Well, you should learn how to do these." That kind of
stuff—"Well, why? I'm never going to have to do that kind of stuff."

STAN HYATT:

Well, our kids have accepted it pretty well I think. At the time—when
they were doing something they didn't really want to do, they objected
to it as a normal kid would do. But as they've gotten a little bit
older, especially the twenty-year-old—now is a junior at Appalachian
State. She is looking at a career of her own, and she's working with
elementary kids because she's going to be a teacher. She's starting to
see the wisdom in the things that we've tried to instill in her for the
last ten, fifteen years. Ever since she's been big enough to understand.
And I think you have the natural rebellious period of kids, and our kids
were no different, where mom and dad don't know anything. But now, I
think they are responding pretty well to what we tried to do there.
We're proud of our kids, and they've learned to do a
lot of things that most kids can't do this day and time. The
sixteen-year-old, for example, was costume mistress in the North
Buncombe High School play that was put on about a month ago. She made
all these costumes for thirty kids, and they're not many
sixteen-year-old girls who could do that today. I was pleased as a
father to see that. Her mother has always loved to sew. Her mother—when
she went off to college with me at Ohio University her parents gave her
a sewing machine and said, "If you need new clothes, get you some
material and make you're clothes. We just can't afford a lot of
outfits." They had three kids in college. And to see this
sixteen-year-old able to do the same thing is very rewarding to me.

ROB AMBERG:

Oh yeah, that's great. Now, is your wife from this area or is she from
Ohio?

STAN HYATT:

She is from Ohio, but her parents moved around, too. Her dad was from
North Carolina, her mother from Elizabethton, Virginia. They moved to
Florida. He was a minister, and he took a church at the Ohio University,
in Athens, Ohio. He was a pastor there at the time that I enrolled there
in school. And so, she's moved around; she's been all over, but her
parents are pretty close to this area. She has the same type of values
that I have, and [it] worked out real well. I think it was planned out
to have it that way.

Yeah, I think fate plays a role in all of those things. My wife is a
rural North Carolinian from down in the Valdese area, and moved up here
in the late 70s-early 80s. I'm from DC. We're decidedly different, [but]
our values just really click with one another. It's pretty amazing. I
guess I want to go back a little bit to this. When I first moved here I
stayed with a woman who was an elderly ballad singer over in Laurel
section. Her father and grandfather were both herb doctors, and [were]
really kind of revered in the community. It seemed like every community
around here had a person who was knowledgeable about
herbs and medicines and things like that. Was that a role your
grandmother played? Did people come to her for remedies or if they had
infections or colds or whatever?

STAN HYATT:

I don't remember people so much coming to her. She had a respected
position. I'm sure people would ask her about things like that. I don't
want to make more out of it than it actually was, but it was just—as I
gathered from what I could see of it at that time, it was tradition for
elderly ladies that had been raised back in the Depression days to try
to make all the medicine type things. If they had a stomachache, they
had a remedy for that. They had a lot of remedies. It was like her
cooking. My grandmother had no recipes for anything; it was all in her
head, and it drove my wife crazy. When we first got married, I would
say, "Granny could really make squirrel dumplings, and I loved that
dish." And she'd go to my grandmother's and say, "Well, how do you make
squirrel dumplings? I need to write the recipe down." Well Granny'd say,
"Well, a little touch of this, a little bit of that, and so forth." My
wife couldn't cook like that. It was the same with the medicines—she
just intuitively knew and remembered how to take sassafras or something
and boil it out. Whatever, I don't remember a lot about that. I just
pointed it out to illustrate that she was very self-reliant.

ROB AMBERG:

That's really interesting to me that people around here kind of existed
on that oral tradition. That passing down and that knowledge that they
had stored.

STAN HYATT:

Yeah, very little written down. My grandmother went to I think the third
or fourth grade. She didn't have much formal training at all. She had
trouble reading big words and so forth. But as far as surviving—and that
was the name of the game through those early years of this century in
Western North Carolina. It was a hard place to live.
You've got cold in the wintertime. I think the weather was more severe
than it is now. There weren't grocery stores to go to and shop. They
made most of their own clothes.

ROB AMBERG:

And there wasn't really money around to buy those things.

STAN HYATT:

There wasn't. There wasn't money. There were a few rich people—the
Vanderbilts and so forth—but the rank-and-file people living here either
had to learn the ways of the land and be able to survive, or they didn't
survive.

ROB AMBERG:

Right. Yeah, I've talked to a lot of people who were raised around here,
and certainly there were little pieces of money that came in when you
sold the tobacco crop, or maybe you sold some herbs or something like
that. But people around here, the vast majority of people didn't really
see any money until almost the early, mid 60s. You know, when the
federal programs started coming in. Your family's move to Ohio sounds
like was maybe a direct response to that.

STAN HYATT:

It was. In the late 50s there weren't many jobs around here; not a lot of
good-paying jobs and so forth. Coming off of the Depression years the
economy hadn't really picked up that well, and my dad just drifted from
place to place looking for something better. That's how he ended up in
Ohio.

Do you remember when you were young, before you had moved, where did you
go to school?

STAN HYATT:

I went to school in Barnardsville for a couple years. Actually, I moved
back and forth to Ohio several times. My parents were up there
regularly, but I didn't like it up there in the big city—in
Cleveland—near as well as I did out in the country. There weren't enough
things to entertain me in the city, so I came back. That's how I stayed
with my grandmother. She reached a point in time—her youngest daughter
left home in the late 50s—that she was by herself,
at that time in her sixties. And so I think it was 1960 I came back the
first time, and stayed with Granny a year or two here. Went to
elementary school at Barnardsville one year, and then went to North
Buncombe High School one year. That's when there wasn't a middle school.
You went straight to the eighth grade then, and I was in the eight grade
there. Then I went back to Ohio; then I came back. So I just kind of
shuffled back and forth between Cleveland and down here. But when I was
here I was living with her, except for the very early years when both my
parents were still here.

ROB AMBERG:

Do you have siblings?

STAN HYATT:

Yes. I have a brother that lives here in Mars Hill now that's a little
bit younger than I am, and a sister in Greensboro.

ROB AMBERG:

That must have been hard for your parents to let you go back—let you come
back here—and potentially not see you for long periods of time, you
being relatively young at that age.

STAN HYATT:

I'm sure like any parents they missed me. I missed them at times, but it
was accepted that Granny needed somebody to help her with the harder
things—the wood splitting and so forth around the house, the gardening,
the carrying and the lifting. A sixty-year-old woman living by herself
is not a good situation, and so they accepted it. And then as I said, I
went back and actually graduated from high school in Ohio. Then my
brother—younger brother—came down and stayed with Granny for a while. So
she had all the boys there with her for most of the time after she was
sixty years old.

ROB AMBERG:

I see that around here a lot. People—again, my friend Delly, who I stayed
with for years, raised a number of children. She raised three children
from her husband's first marriage as well as five
of her own. And then had numerous other people staying with her at
various times. And it seems like that is almost like a value in the
community.

STAN HYATT:

I think it was. Today we would think in terms well, we've raised our kids
up. It's time for them to get out and get their families on their own.
And now it's time for us to rest and relax, and enjoy our later years.
But I never heard anything like that from my grandmother. She was so
family-oriented. She loved her kids, she loved their kids—the
grandchildren—and there was not a bad apple in the bunch in her mind.
That's not the whole truth. We were a normal family; some better than
others. But as far as the responsibility factor that she had to the
family—until her dying day, she would have done anything for any family
members that had problems. That's how she perceived her role as
matriarch of the family, and the family loved her for that. She made it
until she was eighty-eight years old. Finally succumbed to brain tumor.
But even in her last days, she would be thinking about the family, what
she could do for the family members.

ROB AMBERG:

Did she cook with wood, heat with wood, things like that?

STAN HYATT:

She had a wood stove there for a while. About the time I came to stay
with her she traded out and got an electric stove and refrigerator and
things like that. Before my time it was traditional mountain, where they
had a spring and kept all the stuff in that spring with the cool water,
their milk and so forth, but she modernized a little bit. She didn't
have a phone in the house until she was over eighty years old. She
didn't want a phone, but she didn't miss anything.

ROB AMBERG:

Phones and electricity are two of the most significant changes that have
come to the community in the last fifty years or so. They seem to me to
really change the dynamic. Whereas people, like
you say, she didn't really miss out on anything. My sense is that she
probably did a lot of visiting, had people visiting her.

STAN HYATT:

She did. She walked; she didn't drive. I was too young to drive, so when
Sunday came—or Friday night or whenever—it was nothing for us to set out
and walk a mile to one of her elderly friends' homes. Then they would
talk, and it'd be dark, and we'd take a flashlight, and we'd walk back.
[Laughter].

ROB AMBERG:

Did you always have electricity when you were growing up? Or do you
remember a time when you didn't have power?

STAN HYATT:

I don't remember a time without power, either in the house that I lived
in—that I was raised in there—or when I lived with her. She always had
power.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, it certainly came to different parts of the community at different
times. I've met a couple of—you probably met Jerry Plemmons—and I spoke
with him for this project. He's a little bit older than we are. He
remembers the first eight years or so of his life being with out
electricity. He remembers specifically when it came in.

STAN HYATT:

The old house that I remember—my first recollections were it had
electricity in it, but it had no indoor plumbing. It had an outhouse. It
had a coal stove in it. No phone. No insulation in the walls. One of
those homes that you could see cracks. When it snowed, sometimes the
snow would drip through it. But we had feather beds, and either
fireplaces in the living room or coal stoves in the back bedroom. We had
a wood cook-stove in the front, in the kitchen. I don't ever remember
being cold. I may have been cold, but I don't remember it. We seemed to
be warm, and I don't ever remember it being an inconvenience not having
a bathroom in the house. But I'm sure there were times—when people were
sick and had to trudge through the snow to get to the outhouse— that it was an inconvenience. But I don't have
recollections of it being a big problem. Of course, I didn't have that
situation my whole life growing up, but I do remember it being that way
the first six, eight, years of my life.

ROB AMBERG:

And it was a situation that you obviously chose, too. It was one that you
felt more comfortable with than, say, living in the big city, living in
Cleveland. It's almost like kids today would choose those conveniences
and that kind of larger picture.

STAN HYATT:

Keep in mind we didn't have video back then. There TV was just in the
infant stage. There was radio. Most of the houses had a radio, although
I don't remember a radio in the old house where I grew up. But without
all these things that turn people today into couch potatoes, people in
those days had to find something to entertain themselves. So they found
other things. Being out in the country, there's just a lot of nature to
entertain people. We spent a lot of time outdoors and doing things in
the woods and so forth. I don't ever remember feeling like, "Well, I'm
being deprived because I live here." It's the opposite. I felt deprived
when I lived in Cleveland, because it's just surrounded in a big
neighborhood with houses everywhere. I just wasn't used to it, I guess.
It's just a cultural thing. I was raised in a more rural setting, and I
felt comfortable there. But today, you're right, a kid today has been
weaned on MTV, and videos, and the movies, and a car when he was sixteen
years old, and all the things parents give their kids today. It's a
shame in a way, but I guess some people say that's progress [Laughter]. Things change, and lifestyles change, and cultures change.
That's the nature of life that things are constantly changing.

ROB AMBERG:

As an adult, as a parent, as a member of your community, it sounds like
you're really trying to maintain some of those older traditions. Kind of
continue them, teach some of these things to your
children. Obviously things change, but it also sounds like you're trying
to maintain some of those things, too.

STAN HYATT:

Yes, I think it's important that we pass down all the traditions that we
possibly can. I asked my kids, and they think it's funny when I ask them
this question. I try to get them—or did when they were younger—try to
get them to go out and help me garden. And there's some work in
gardening, having to dig and prune, and spray, and all that stuff you do
gardening. I said, "Well, what would happen if the economy got bad
again? Why, I've seen it when I was real little, or even worse before I
was born. What would happen if that happened today and you couldn't go
over to Ingles in Mars Hill and buy bread and milk. What would you do?"
I don't want to be pessimistic or a forecaster of doom coming in the
future, but to me that's a valid question. That was something my
grandmother and others instilled in me. You have to be knowledgeable
enough to take care of yourself and not depend on everybody else to lay
things in your lap.

ROB AMBERG:

I think it's good to be in a place where you can depend on yourself, too.
Not every place is like that.

I think Madison County, North Carolina has got to be up at the top of the
list. I have a neighbor that can sit down and make wagon wheels from
scratch. They're carpenters, they're plumbers, they're automobile
mechanics. They can do anything. I'm not that gifted myself. I don't
want to mislead you and you think that I am, but these people in Madison
County—because it was isolated somewhat geographically and by the road
situation from the rest of the world, they learned to survive. I'm
convinced that the older people over here could do just about anything
to make a living if everything collapsed economy-wise and everything,
and that to me is a very valuable thing to be able
to do. They could make it. I feel like that a lot of people in the
cities that have all the conveniences today—if we ever went into bad
economic times, they would really suffer.

ROB AMBERG:

I think you're right about that. When I first moved to the county in
'73—most of the new-comers that I know that moved in back then were all
kind of adopted by a local family. People who taught us you don't burn
pine [Laughter]—you burn oak, you burn locust, you burn hickory, those kinds of
things, because they're going to just warm you better. You know, how to
head up a spring, and stuff like that.

STAN HYATT:

Well, see, you've got 200 years of history here that they passed from
father to son on down ten generations or however long this area's been
settled. They had to learn to do it right, or they just went without
water, or they went without shelter, or they went without heat or
whatever. There's been a storehouse of knowledge built up there, and to
me, to lose that would be a tremendous waste.

ROB AMBERG:

I totally agree with that. We have a spring, and heat with wood, and
garden pretty heavily, and keep a few animals. And the same thing I tell
my kids over and over again, is that, "First of all, you need to hang on
to this land. Because even if you don't want to live here for periods of
time, this really gives you a security that you're not going to get from
anything else. It's that knowledge that you can come here and raise some
food and can it or put it in the freezer. You're always going to have
water. Those kinds of things. And that kind of knowledge, to me, is what
real security is all about.

STAN HYATT:

I think of the movie, "Gone With the Wind" and Scarlett O'Hara, at some
point in the movie—when she comes back to the plantation it's all torn
up; there's no crops in the fields or anything. But she reaches down and
she gets a handful of that red clay dirt and she
says—well, I don't remember the exact quote, but basically it's the land
that survives and goes on.

It's curious to me now, as I look at the wave of new people that are
coming into the community. That change has been going on for a while. It
certainly didn't come with the road or anything like that. I mean, it's
been happening for—

STAN HYATT:

Twenty or thirty years.

ROB AMBERG:

Exactly. What I sense, though, among this kind of more recent group of
new people, is that the value of the land seems to be based more on its
economic value. It's an asset. It becomes a monetary asset as opposed to
that image that we just talked about with Scarlett O'Hara—it's the land,
and this is what will really provide for me. That concerns me. It almost
seems like there is a cultural shift that is happening. It seems to be
pretty pervasive, not just here but all over the country. But again, we
notice it here because we're here, but also because Madison County has
been closed off. And those values have been allowed to exist for a
longer period of time than they did in other parts of the country.

Well, I agree with you. What we saw back when we first moved over here—at
that point in time, the few people moving in here would be adopted by
the local people. The people that came initially to Madison wanted to
grow their own wool or whatever, and grow their gardens. And they
learned from the people here. Basically took on the values of the people
here while retaining their own individual values. But if that is
shifting and if people are looking at it as an economic thing just to
buy and sell land, I think that will change the complexion or the nature
of the county for the worse. I really hate to see that, myself. To me,
the land is something to be preserved. As a road builder I hate to cut the land up. I realize the necessity of it,
and that you have to state the priorities. But I'd hate to see a big
farm—a family farm—where a fellow inherited one-hundred acres from his
dad, and then he decides to sell that land, and then it's cut up into
one acre tracts and so forth. I hate to see that, but it's a part of
change. People in this free nation we live in have the right to do
things like that, but I hope that I don't live long enough to see
Madison change drastically. We have a small population of people in a
big land area, and there's a lot of national forest area, and there's a
lot of natural beauty to the area. I know that most of the people,
either native or the people that have moved in—non-native people—want to
maintain Madison. They don't want to make a Buncombe County out of it,
or a Wake County or whatever. They want it to remain a rural isolated
county, but at the same time they want industry. They want growth; they
want convenience. So, all of that is in a mix right now, and I don't
know how it's going to shake out, Rob.

ROB AMBERG:

I kind of look at that and just wonder. It's interesting. You, certainly,
being raised here know this. When I first moved here it was two-lane
from Asheville out to Mars Hill, and certainly on over the mountain into
Erwin and Johnson City. The first project we saw was kind of a widening
of [US Highway] 19/23 from two-lane to four-lane, and then in the early
80s the four-lane being put in from Weaverville to Marshall. What was
immediately evident was just how that better access changed the whole
dynamic of everything. There was suddenly increased opportunities for
people not only to move in, but for people to go out and find better
jobs and things like that. But that really changes a person's
relationship with their place.

STAN HYATT:

It does. Again, it's just progress. People call it progress, but it's
change that will occur. Areas don't tend to be the same—stay the same
indefinitely. They tend to change over time, and
Western North Carolina is a very desirable place. If you talk to a lot
of people from all around the country, especially Eastern USA, and you
read the magazines that promote growth and tourism and rate the areas
according to the various rating schemes—the education, the climate, all
the things, the job opportunities they put in—this is a very desirable
area. When I was a kid, it seems like—and I may not know what I'm
talking about, but I'll make a speculation—the more desirable area was
Northeastern America. And then when we had the problems with
energy—which we still have energy problems that are going to continue to
plague us—but the industrialization of the Northeast shifted. A lot of
people have moved to Atlanta; they've moved to Western North Carolina.
They're getting out of that cold Northeast. This area, because it was
inaccessible fifty years ago, was not as desirable. But now with the
access, it's opening up. People that come here to vacation—leaf season
or whatever—they're not happy where they are. Of course, I have a
feeling there's a lot of people in America that are not happy where they
are.

ROB AMBERG:

I'm not sure they could be happy anywhere.

STAN HYATT:

Well, that's how I feel. They say, "Well, we'll move to Florida." And
they don't like Florida. "We don't want to go back to New Jersey,
though. So, let's try Western North Carolina." So there's a lot of
people moving in here, and there's a lot of opportunity. I think the
area has more opportunity for residential type situations than a lot of
big business. We just don't have the geography of big flat areas to
develop, like the Piedmont of North Carolina does. But I think that this
area has a tremendous potential for residential areas. As you see the
new roads put in and the accesses near the interchanges, I think we're
going to see more and more people wanting to move out into the suburbs, so to speak. Out of downtown Asheville, but be
close enough to get on the interstate and be at work in Asheville in
less than half an hour. You see that in every city. Charlotte is one
that's amazed me in North Carolina. The I-77 quarter through there
between Charlotte and Statesville—just thirty years ago
Charlotte—Mecklenberg County was contained ten miles or so north of the
heart of town. Now you're up to Huntersville or almost to Statesville.
Most of those people work and spend most of their time in Charlotte, but
they want to live up forty-five minutes away from Charlotte.

Right. I was doing a lot of work down around Iredell County back in the
mid-late 80s, photographing a lot of farms down in there. I remember
that whole little juncture right there, right around where I-40 and I-77
meet, and there was like one or two gas stations. There was nothing
there.

STAN HYATT:

Yeah, there was nothing! Nothing there.

ROB AMBERG:

And now there's this enormous mall that has just expanded, and as you go
north out of Statesville up and towards Harmony—.

Exactly. It's mushrooming. We've spoken a lot about the uniqueness of
this area, and just how it really is at the—in many and certainly in my
opinion—at the top of the list in terms of the place where you really
can be self-sufficient. That culture, that society, those traditions
have been allowed to maintain, a lot of it because of the isolation,
because of the relative isolation. One of the dangers that we have,
then, is making it more homogenous, more like every place else.

STAN HYATT:

But what do you do to prevent that from happening? I remember a few years
back Oregon put out a notice that, "We want you to come out and visit,
but we don't want you to move here." North
Carolina, right now—I don't know if you're aware of it—is the third
fastest growing state in the nation. There's a tremendous number of
people moving in. The big computer complex [Tapping noise on recording speaker].—what am I trying to say—Research Triangle Park. That has
outgrown the whole area now. The roads cannot keep up; the residential
areas can't. Nothing can keep up! And where do you draw the line? Who
draws the line?

ROB AMBERG:

And how do you draw the line?

STAN HYATT:

And how do you fence off the area and say, "No, we're not going to take
anybody else." And how do you infringe on the rights of the people—their
freedoms to sell and trade land and do the things that they want to do
with it? I don't know what the answer is. I'm not sure there is an
answer to that situation. But I believe as long as this is a desirable
area, which it has become recently—in the last twenty years or so—that
you're going to see this influx of people into North Carolina. You're
going to see building, and the things that go with an influx of new
people. And I don't think it's all good or all bad. I think there's some
good in it, but I do think that the local people have the feeling that
you have—that it reaches a point of saturation when the dynamics start
to change. When the new people decide they want to control the power
bases—they want to be on the school board, they want to be the county
commissioners—and they have different views than the prevailing view of
the local people—that's when you see the clashes. I've seen that happen
in some of the surrounding counties. It may happen in Madison County.

I suspect you're right about that. And actually, we see little bits and
pieces, signs of that happening. This big cell tower debate has been
part of—

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

ROB AMBERG:

That's pretty representative of the cell tower issue, of things that are
yet to come. It's always curious to me watching new people come in and
cut in a driveway up to the top of the ridge. I always go back and look
at the old person—the old woman—I stayed with for a long time when I
first moved here. Native-born people understood that you build low
because it's more protective. It's going to give you better access, and
you don't have to maintain a road up to the top of the mountain. I just
look at those kinds of things and kind of go, "Okay, this is another
little symptom here."

STAN HYATT:

Yeah, well, you see those people make mistakes sometimes, and you know
they're making a mistake. But they have a right to make that mistake
[Laughter].. They'll pay for it!

ROB AMBERG:

They'll pay for it sooner or later. They'll have to maintain that
mile-long driveway up to the top of the ridge. And they're going to be
hot in the summer, windy, and just totally unprotected. And frankly, I
moved here because an uncle of mine had moved to Marshall back in 1970,
and I stopped to visit him and never left. He was one of the first
people in the county to do that very thing. You know, built a house
right up on top of a ridgeline. It was beautiful, but I mean, had an
enormous fuel bill and energy bill because of it. You know, just exposed
out there.

I'm wondering if you can give me an encapsulated history of I-26. Go back
as far as you want to go back. I certainly am aware of a lot of this,
but I'd like you to talk a little bit about that and how it kind of came
into being. What the concerns were, what the issues were. All those
kinds of things.

I think the beginning point for any discussion on this portion of I-26,
Rob, is to look at not just this little segment of road in Madison
County, but the whole quarter—north/south quarter—of I-26/US 23. If you
go south of Mars Hill, you can go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. And
you're basically on an interstate highway, except for the portion in
Buncombe County that'll be eventually rehabilitated. When you get to
Asheville, you're on I-26. You end up in Charleston, South Carolina.
That's all interstate, approximately 200 miles; I don't know exactly how
far it is.

ROB AMBERG:

That's about right.

STAN HYATT:

When you leave Mars Hill, or leave North Carolina at the north end of
Madison County at Sam's Gap, you're on a four-lane highway that goes at
least to Columbus, Ohio. The only reason I know that, that's where
mother-in-law lives and that's the way we go. There have been sections
recently completed up there that were detoured, like we have here in
Madison County, around an old two-lane road that was eighty years old or
so. But those have all been completed now. I just was up there for
Thanksgiving a few weeks ago, or last week I should say. The only
missing link in this whole quarter now—from Charleston, South Carolina
to Columbus, Ohio—is the nine-mile section in Madison County. Of course,
thirty years ago there were more sections in Kentucky, Virginia, and
other places of this quarter. But it's a natural north/south quarter
that's moved commerce and people. I suspect if you went back to the
history, it was an old drover's route a hundred years ago, where people
drove cattle and pigs and turkeys and things like they did down along
the Buncombe turnpike, down the French Broad River. I think they
probably did the same thing across Sam's Gap, and so commerce has moved.
It's been a natural quarter for over a hundred years. It became
apparent, as these other sections were being
completed on either end of Madison County back in the 70s, that this was
or would be a missing link through Madison County that needed a more
modern road than the old US 23 highway up Murray Mountain to Sam's Gap.
That road was built in the mid-30s. I'm sure when they opened it up and
had a ribbon-cutting back in the 30s you could just see the exubalation
[slang for exuberance and exhiliration]on the faces of the people coming over the mountain from Erwin,
Tennessee. But if you stop and look, they didn't have tractor-trailers
then. The traffic count would have probably been a few hundred people a
day, and today of course we have nearly 10,000 people a day and six to
seven hundred tractor-trailer routes per day.

ROB AMBERG:

I didn't realize it was that high.

STAN HYATT:

Yes, and even the bigger tractor-trailer rigs have been banned from using
the road. That ban went into effect about five years ago because of the
concern of the families living on Murray Mountain that were putting
their school kids out there. The mothers were just terrified that a
runaway truck—these big rigs—would come off the mountain and run over a
loaded school bus. So, even with the ban we're still having 500 to 700
rigs per twenty four hour period come off of the mountain. That road has
just outlived its usefulness. Unfortunately, because of the grade of it,
the terrain of it, the horizontal alignment of it, it is not possible to
go in and put an easy remedy on fixing the existing road.

You're on a good track and I want to jump back to that. You mentioned
horizontal alignment. Could you talk—

STAN HYATT:

I'm talking about curvature. As you go from the base of Murray Mountain
to the top you have a lot of switchbacks in it—very short curves that
are sharp in nature and very steep banks and super elevations. The road
just gets a heavy frost on it, and the tractor-trailer rigs jack-knife
up there on the road. They block the road. The next thing we know, the
road's closed down. If we get a one, two inch snowfall, it's almost
automatic that that road is going to be closed. There's not a good
parallel route adjacent to US-23 to detour traffic. So when the road
closes down, people that move the commerce in and out of Western North
Carolina basically have to go around Knoxville and I-75, take I-40 from
Asheville over there and around. It's a real hard detour. There's not a
good, easy way—alternate route.

ROB AMBERG:

And Pigeon River Gorge is no picnic either.

STAN HYATT:

It's no picnic either.

ROB AMBERG:

I think it's closed down in the western direction now.

STAN HYATT:

It is. And I was going to say that at times when I-40 is closed and all
that traffic is detoured up US-23—as happened in the summer July, August
of 1997—we saw that tractor-trailer rig count jump from about five or
six hundred per day to 2,000 per day. I don't know if you remember it,
but we also saw the fatalities on that.

ROB AMBERG:

I think there were three fatalities.

STAN HYATT:

There were three fatalities that year within three weeks of each other.

So it was recognized early on—back in the 70s—that that road was becoming
outdated. At that time there was an Appalachian Regional Commission in
effect through the Federal Highway Administration, and there was a
plan—an initial plan in the 70s—to go on and build
some kind of a new interstate-type highway through Madison County to
replace US-23. And for lack of funding, lack of interest, recession,
whatever, it never happened. Then, in the late 80s—'88, '89, somewhere
in that period, there was a renewed interest in building I-26. And the
governor—new governor at that time, Governor Hunt—or new in that year—I
don't remember if that was his second term or his first term. He got a
lot of requests from people in Madison and Buncombe counties in
particular to get something moving on that. And the business people that
wanted the road for industry, commerce, tourism, and the traffic
engineers with the DOT that wanted safety and driving convenience and so
forth, all came together. And a plan was hatched to go on and build the
road. With the help of the governor and the board members and all the
people that fueled that procedure—the political procedure that's
involved in road building—the governor was able to get enough money to
start the initial design of it back in those early years. And then it
proceeded through the phase of the environmental impact statement, which
went on for over three years. And the whole time momentum was being
gained to build the road. We've got in better economic times than we
were. No gas lines or recessions. The economy has been good, so the tax
money generated that builds these roads was there. They were able to
shift the building from other areas in North Carolina. In past years,
there's been big emphasis areas in Winston-Salem, Charlotte, I-40 to
Wilmington, and so forth. That was shifted to this area enough to get
the funding set up. Then the design was in place and built, so we
actually started construction on these two sections here in front of the
office back in '93. The first section was just a rehabilitation of an
existing four-lane. We took out grade crossings and put bridge crossings
in, separations, built interchanges and so forth. The second project, which started in '96, was the first new
alignment section from NC-213 up to where [NC highway] 19 and 23 split,
north of Mars Hill. That was completed in '98, but before it was
completed—in the fall of '96—we began these two massive projects, the
810-C and D projects that we're still working on today. That's a
generalization of the recap. There's probably more areas that I could
get into.

I'd like to go back just a little bit. I guess I-40 was completed, when,
the late 60s, early 70s?

STAN HYATT:

I want to say that's correct. I don't know the exact date, but that's
generally correct.

ROB AMBERG:

I'm aware a little bit of the politics of why I-40 got placed where it is
and stuff like that. Obviously the existing road—the main road—from
Asheville over to Knoxville—had been [US] 25-70 prior to I-40, which
goes right through Marshall and Madison County. I'm curious about how
this portion of I-26—this nine-mile section—kind of relates to that
completion of I-40 through Pidgeon River Gorge. Was I-40 the initial
design? Or, I mean, I-26? Was this the ideal route kind of thing? Again,
my understanding is that because of Dan Moore and the politics of that
particular era, it was decided to put I-40 through Haywood County
instead of Madison.

STAN HYATT:

There are some similarities, some connections, between these two roads,
but they're also differences. If you look at the alignment of I-40, it's
more of an east/west road, and I-26 is more of a north/south road. There
was a proposal to build I-40 through Madison County, which was bitterly
contested by the people in Madison County in those early days—the 60s, I
guess early 60s. Because of the politics it was decided to put it
through Haywood County instead. There's been a sense of loss in Madison
County. I think if you talk to the business
people, the lawyers, the people that are in the know in Madison County,
[they feel] they were short-changed in that whole process. Every time
there's a rock slide now on I-40 in Haywood County, they're quick to
point out that road should have been built through Madison County. Down
through Marshall, Hot Springs, and so forth. So, there is a connection
there, but I tend to look at the two roads as two separate quarters. If
you look at it from a quarter standpoint, you did have an east/west
quarter from Asheville through Haywood County, toward Knoxville. These
two roads don't really replace each other. I think there will always be
a need for two separate roads because of the two quarter routes. I don't
think I-26 is a replacement for I-40, although I think it's going to be
wonderful for the people in DOT after I-26 is open to have the latitude
to detour that I-40 traffic. Because there's going to continue to be
rock slides on I-40. I-40 was built in an era when you didn't worry
about what was left; you just blew the mountainside to smithereens and
hoped that you didn't have to haul too much, that it would just blow it
away. So there was a lot of collateral damage—residual damage—to what
was left over there on the slopes.

ROB AMBERG:

And this is what we're suffering today.

STAN HYATT:

Yes. We're paying the price for doing it real cheap. It was not so much
of a cut-rate thing back when they did it. That's all they could afford
when they did it, but it goes more to the heart of the design. I know
that I-26 was much more carefully planned out. I don't want to say
there's no possibility we couldn't have a rock slide on I-26 when it's
open. But if you look at the type of construction over here, and even
look at the type on Tennessee's side of US-23 now, that will tie
into—that'll all eventually be I-26—it is eons ahead of what they did
back in the 60s down on I-40. And the type of terrain—the rock formations may contribute to that also. There may be
differences. This rock up here seems to be a harder rock, I think, and
not as jointed and messed up as that is down there. There's always going
to be trouble down there, unless somebody can afford to go in and
totally rehabilitate that whole thing. And I think you'd be talking
about billions of dollars to do that. In a couple years when we open
I-26, we will have that alternate route. But they don't exactly replace
each other. Someone travelling I-40 will be able to use I-26, but
they're going to end up going an hour or two out of their way.

If they're heading west, yeah, that's going to be a problem. You talked
about the environmental assessment that went on for three years prior to
the actual construction. What kinds of issues was the Department of
Transportation facing environmentally with a project of this scale,
scope and location? What were some of the major things that you were
concerned about and had to deal with and continue to deal with?

STAN HYATT:

Well, there are a number of issues that are involved in that
environmental impact statement. They look at the location of the houses
that'll be replaced—the schools, the churches, the graveyards. And of
course, we have had to replace some of the housing—buy people out or
move them into different areas to make room for this I-26. We did move
three cemeteries, I think. And that's tough when you have people already
buried, and you have to deal with the relatives of those people and move
the graves. Although, that went a lot better than I thought it would go.
We didn't have really a tough time with that. We hired a professional
grave-mover that knew what he was doing [and was] sensitive to the
problems with the families and the needs of the families, so that went
fairly well. One of the biggest areas, environmentally, that we've had
to deal with is the fact that a lot of this area
that we're working through is high-quality water, or trout stream water.
We've replaced some of the smaller streams with piping, and that was a
big issue. We had to pay a mitigation fee and let the wildlife
department and the court—basically North Carolina Wildlife Department—go
other places in Madison County. That fee was over a million dollars.
They have been doing off site mitigation all over Madison County—going
to property owners and saying, "You know, you've got cattle in this area
along the creek. We'd like to do a long-term lease with you, and maybe
move the fence back out of the creek and go in and rebuild the stream
bank, plant trees." That was mandated, because this section of
interstate hit through an area probably no more than fifteen acres of
what was considered wetlands—just isolated places where the core of
engineers, the wildlife people, felt it was unique and qualified as a
wetland area. So we had to pay that fee to go off site. And they're
still rebuilding these streams around the county to offset the taking
out of streams and putting pipes in. But aside from all that, we've had
to worry about as we build the job, are we going to silt up those
streams? Are we going to deposit hot rock from the road building that'll
leech the acid sulfates out of the rock and change the pH of the
streams, kill the trout, kill the bugs? So there are a lot of things
involved in that environmental question you've asked. And it's been,
aside from safety and quality, one of the three biggest issues of
building this road.

I've read a statistic that on this job there was the largest single order
for culvert pipe ever recorded in the United States.

STAN HYATT:

Yes. There're only two major pipe manufacturers in the country that do
steel pipe. Each one of them got the order on one of the big jobs. The
Gilbert job, the C job, had fifteen miles of metal pipe, and that was by
Lane Pipe Company. And Lane did tell us that that
was the largest single order for any project of any kind in the country
for metal pipe.

ROB AMBERG:

That's remarkable to me. I spent some time up at the Babbitt's property
on Sprinkle Creek. I remember going up there one time. It was the last
apple season that they had up there before the orchard was bulldozed,
but my son and I went up there and picked apples. I remember talking
with Lucille and Howard, and they were talking about all the springs
that were on that property. I think that he was claiming that there were
as many as thirty springs on that property. How do you as an engineer
then, kind of wrestle with that issue? You know, I remember being out
there with Jody one time—Jody Kuhne. We were up on Little Creek, and we
were looking at the mountain face and looking at the mountain and
standing on US-23 right there. He said, "Well, all of this is really
pretty insignificant, geologically. It's really the creek that's the
major geological thing in this specific area." So with that idea in
mind, then, my sense is that if you've got a place with twenty springs
or ten springs, that each one of those things is going to—over a period
of time—serve to erode what would be your fill area or the road itself.

STAN HYATT:

Well, what we had to do, Rob, was capture each of those individual
springs in a piping system. And that's what we've done at each of the
major fills. Before we start putting the fill material in one of the
things we had to do was a lot of undercutting, because of the type of
material that's prevalent in this area. It's called coluvium material.
It's not a good material to build the fills on. And so the first order
of business under all the fills was to go in and dig out these coluvium
deposits, some which were up to fifty feet deep, and replace those with
shot rock. When we went in and dug under those areas—under where the
interstate would be, down at ground level before the fill was started—we
could see where the water was coming from. So
we captured all of that in what we call underdrain pipe. And so now the
water will come off of the mountain down the way it's always come down.
As it approaches the project, it will be funneled into underdrain piping
systems so that it runs underneath the road through those systems. It
never builds up. It continues to run downhill like it always did, but
just doesn't build up under the road in those coluvium deposits. That's
part of the engineering nature of what we have to do to build a road, is
keep the water out from under the road. If we didn't leave a way for it
to get out, it would either totally saturate the land or build up or
both, and make a lake above the road. So that's part of what we do in
building a road, is just capture that water and funnel it on through
piping systems under the road.

ROB AMBERG:

It strikes me. I've had this experience a number of times when I've been
up on the highway. Obviously just the enormity of this project, but at
the same time there is a minuteness also. I think in terms of dealing
with an individual spring that might be putting out a quarter of a
gallon a minute or something like that. You have this enormous project,
but then you have really small little details all along the route that
have to be dealt with also.

STAN HYATT:

Well, that's true. We have that situation. But we have that on most of
our jobs. This job is not unique; we've had a lot of springs on most of
our jobs in these mountains in the past. This area—from the Babbit apple
orchard in particular, across Buckner Gap, all the way down to Bear
Branch Road—has been an area that's had more springs than any place I've
ever been and all the highway jobs I've worked on. Another way we've had
to deal with those springs is go in and do horizontal drains, which will
bore holes that we drill into the mountainside horizontally or at a
small angle, hence the name horizontal drains. We
go back two, three hundred feet into the mountain with a small
hole—maybe four-inch hole, three-inch hole—and we put a PVC pipe in. And
we just keep jamming in until it goes back into those area where the
groundwater is, where the springs originate from. Those things are
opened up so that the water runs out. We have some that we put in three
years ago that are still draining water out of them. But once we get the
water out—captured—in that pipe, we can deal with it. It's not like it
just runs everywhere underground. But this area, just because of its
geological nature, is just covered with springs.

This specific job is not necessarily unique in that respect, in that you
face these kinds of issues on a lot of jobs in the mountains. Talk a
little bit about what has been unique to this job. What are some of the
issues that you've faced that you haven't seen before, that maybe caused
you to do things differently than you normally would've as an engineer?

STAN HYATT:

The first thing that would strike a highway engineer doing the kind of
work that I do is the enormity of it. That's the biggest obstacle. I
think we have a total of—on the Gilbert job, the C job—twenty six
million cubic yards of material. That's about six or seven times what
was moved out of Beaucatcher open cut in Asheville.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

STAN HYATT:

And there is a set period of the contract. This material does have to be
moved. It was a longer contract than normal because of the size of it,
but it is still five years. The contractor has to move all of that
material in that time period, or he's penalized. There's a pretty stiff
penalty, like about five thousand dollars per day, if he doesn't make
it. So that sets up a schedule—for four years of the five years the
contractor had to move a half million yards per
month. Something of that nature. Just to physically get it all moved on
time. When you look at doing that, a normal DOT road building project
would be one of the size of these here in front of the office, where you
had two million yards to move in two or three years. Now we're talking
twenty six million yards in five years. So the contractor had to—he
realized that when he bid it, and he had to bring in equipment capable
of moving that. So you see this enormous equipment on this job. Huge
shovels that'll pick up forty or fifty tons of shot rock in one scoop.
Trucks that'll haul 200 tons of material down the road. But even with
that, you still have the human aspect of it. You have to have drivers
for those trucks. You have to have an operator. The pay is good for this
area, but it's not phenomenal for this kind of work. So there've been
turnover in people. The planning aspect of it, just to move all that
stuff, would be one of the biggest factors. Then you look at the size of
the cuts and fills. You look at 400 to 600 foot cuts. That's not normal
for western North Carolina. Maybe out in Colorado you see cuts of this
magnitude, but you don't see them around here. So just working in these
big huge areas, and moving so much per day—night and day—was a big
aspect of the work. And having to transition from managing the smaller
projects to managing this project was one of the things that me and my
assistants have had to do.

ROB AMBERG:

Has this been professionally for you the job of a lifetime, so to speak?

STAN HYATT:

It would be the job of a lifetime for any DOT engineer. I've had in my
career an average of maybe five to eight projects per year. As I've
said, a big interstate project would be a ten million dollar project to
move two million yards of material. We have a lot of smaller projects
where we resurface the roads every year. Or we build bridge replacement
projects. Half million dollar job to put a new bridge in. And that's what most of the resident engineers of North
Carolina that have the job that I have do day in, day out, year after
year for a thirty, forty-year career. But then to have something like
this come along, that's just totally unique. Nobody else has had
anything like that. Not even really close to it, many of the other
people. And it's on the tail-end of my career, because I've got
thirty-one years with the state. I'll be retiring, if I live long
enough, in a few years. This has perked up my interest level
tremendously.

[Laughs]. I'm curious, was there a lot of competition for this particular
spot? Were there other engineers who were just chomping at the bits?

STAN HYATT:

The Department of Transportation is divided into fourteen divisions, and
each division has six or eight counties in it. This is division
thirteen, which is everything from the Haywood County line to Hickory.
We have seven counties here. We have three resident engineers that do
all of the major construction—big projects. Of course, our maintenance
people do smaller projects themselves. But for the new contract
projects, the three resident engineer offices—one in Asheville, one here
in Mars Hill, and one in Marion—manage all the work going on in division
thirteen. It's contract work. It's more of a geographic thing. It was
just more of fate that I was here at this time and place, but there's
actually no competition.

I have heard concerns from primarily environmentalists that this route,
because of its location—because like you say it opens up the southern
Ohio Valley basically, and opens it up to the lowlands and South
Carolina—that there is a concern about hazardous waste on this road.
That is kind of one of the prime motivations. Do you have any thoughts
on that?

STAN HYATT:

When you say prime motivations, do you mean for building the road?

ROB AMBERG:

For building the road.

STAN HYATT:

I have heard nothing about that in official DOT capacity. I know that
hazardous waste materials are moved across the interstate systems all
over the country from place to place. It would not surprise me to find
out in the future that, since South Carolina takes hazardous waste, that
other states will use the route if they're in this quarter area.
Probably some of them are coming down I-40 and I-85 and I-77 now, and I
don't know of any prohibition that the state would put on that. But as
far as building a road just for that purpose, I don't think that would
be the case. Or that might have been one of the fifty reasons for
justifying I-26, but it would not be up in the top. Not from North
Carolina DOT standpoint, anyway.

ROB AMBERG:

And obviously, this is going to be a much safer, better route than I-40.

STAN HYATT:

I want to make sure that I'm getting this point across. North Carolina
would not build a road through North Carolina so that Pennsylvania or
Michigan can get their waste to South Carolina. If there's something
there, it's way above my level and they have not involved me in that.
But I've never heard anything that would lead me to believe that.

ROB AMBERG:

Like you say, waste is travelling, and I would fully expect that that
would be the case on this road at some point. But as far as it being a
prime motivator, it's not.

STAN HYATT:

I don't think so. We're involved in building the best road for the money
for the time period that we're in. That's our commission from the
taxpayers, or our job description if you want to look at it that way.
We're just building a part of the whole nation-wide interstate system.

There's an interesting book out. It's a history of the interstate system.
It's called Divided Highways, I think. I can't remember the author's
name, but in reading that book he was talking about the initial
motivation for the interstate highway system back in the early 50s.
President Eisenhower basically was really enlightened when he was
fighting Hitler in Germany and saw the road system.

STAN HYATT:

Saw the Autobahn System, and he realized the importance from national
security standpoint more than anything, I think. To be able to move
military machinery and people rapidly—from point A to point
B—nation-wide. And he looked at the fact that the United States did not
have anything that compared to that. That's my understanding of how the
interstate system was born. He brought it back from Germany and said,
"Let's build that in this country." I think he did it primarily for
national defense, but also realizing that commerce and other things
would benefit from it.

ROB AMBERG:

That's exactly my understanding. I think he had had an experience in
between the two world wars where he was heading up an army division or
something like that. And it took them over a month to move across
country—move that whole division across country—and recognize that "Boy,
we could be in a situation where this is just going to be untenable. We
have to be able to do better than that." And obviously, commercial and
tourism traffic the 50s was beginning to play a more major role, as
truck traffic was increasing, and commercial traffic. You talked about
this quarter being historically a commercial trade route, and the
reading I've done is that even Native Americans were moving along this
very route three, four hundred years ago maybe, trading. Tribes from the
Southern Appalachians were trading with tribes from the southern Ohio
valley. I talk about that fact when I talk about lecture and show slides
and things like that. That in a sense, we're
taking that commercial trade route that has been in existence for
hundreds of years. We are expanding it; we are widening it, true. But
this is a historical route that has been there as long as man has been
in this area. It's not something new.

STAN HYATT:

I think that's the case. And I think the road has just been modernized to
match the times. I said before this old road that crossed the mountain
now that we're dealing with was built nearly seventy years ago. For all
I know, back in the 30s there were as many horse and buggies went across
there on that opening day as there were automobiles.

ROB AMBERG:

I think that's accurate.

STAN HYATT:

Have you met this guy, Calahan? He lives right off of Bear Branch up in
that hollow up there. He and his brother were the famous Calahan
Brothers back in the 30s and 40s. They were a musical duo, and they
played in the Grand Ole' Opry and a number of places. But he was telling
me when he was growing up and they were first getting started on their
music career, they would travel up and down 23 in a horse and buggy and
play these little gigs in these churches and schoolhouses and things all
the way up to Johnson City. [They would] go back and forth on a pretty
regular basis, doing that until they eventually moved on to bigger and
better things. But he said it was all wagon travel. Horse travel.

STAN HYATT:

I've seen pictures of people trying to bring wagons across the top of
Sam's Gap back at the turn of the century, mired down in the mud. You'd
see people pushing the wheels and somebody else leading the horses,
trying to get them all coordinated move that thing out of the mud. And
you can just imagine looking at those mountains now, aside from the road. Forget the roads there, but try to envision
going across that thing a hundred years ago in a horse and buggy. You
wouldn't be in Erwin in a half hour like you can today [Laughs].

ROB AMBERG:

That's entirely correct. Have you ever heard of a book called The Road by
a man named John Ehle?

STAN HYATT:

I can't say it as I have, Rob.

ROB AMBERG:

I'll bring you a copy. This was, basically, it's a novel, but it is about
the building of the road system from Old Fort into Swannanoa back in the
1870s. It'll really put road building into perspective for you. It's a
wonderful book, and I've got it. I'll try and remember to bring that
over to you. I think you would really just find it thoroughly
interesting in terms of how it was done and what they had to do to do
this thing. Used a lot of convict labor.

STAN HYATT:

I have another book. I think it's called Kingdom of Madison.

ROB AMBERG:

Yes, I've got that one.

STAN HYATT:

Written by a history professor at University of North Carolina Chapel
Hill.

ROB AMBERG:

Wellman.

STAN HYATT:

Wellman, Manly Welman?

ROB AMBERG:

That's right.

STAN HYATT:

Sounds right. He tells about the old turnpike down the river. It's
probably very similar to what you're talking about. Back in the early
days—and this would have been the 1800s—that's how you paid your taxes.
The men went out and carried rocks, and they shoveled and
wheel-barrowed, and improved a section of road that washed out in
flooding and all that. And they had to work for a week or so to pay
their taxes, or put somebody else out there in
their place to do that. It is interesting to read about the old initial
efforts at road building. The ends were along the road where the drovers
would come through and stay for the night and put their livestock in the
pen, and feed them and pay their fees and have their meal inside by the
big fireplace and so forth. And get up the next morning and go another
fifteen miles or ten miles, and do the same thing. When you stop and
think about how long it would have taken people to drive a herd of
cattle—how many several hundred cattle, I guess, from Johnson City to
Greenville, South Carolina—you're probably talking about a month's trip
or something like that. It would have been interesting. I'd love to have
a video-tape to look back in time.

ROB AMBERG:

Wouldn't that be nice?

STAN HYATT:

Or a time machine to see.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, actually see what it was like. My friend Delly was born I guess in
1900, and she lived over in Sodom Laurel and talked about how her family
raised tobacco when it was first brought into the area. Another way for
them to get money was for them to go out and gather herbs and really
stockpile lots of herbs, because evidently there was an herb house in
Asheville. She was saying they would stockpile things, and then they'd
get a huge wagon load of stuff. But you're talking a two, three, four
day trip for them to take that wagon load of herbs to Asheville, sell
it, maybe do some shopping while they were there, and then get back out
of there. We're talking a long time. Just a big effort. I want to go
back a little bit to a couple things. One of the environmental concerns
I know is that this is prime black bear habitat. I read the article in
the Sentinel last week about the bear tunnels, and certainly have known
about those for a while. And you talked early on about bear-hunting as a
child, and going out with relatives to do that kind of thing. How does a road like this affect those
populations? Not just the bear, but other wildlife and flora. What do
you see as the effect? How do you deal with that?

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

( ) that this is one of the real prime black bear habitats in the eastern
United States. How does, then, something like an interstate highway,
with an enormous right-of-way, really affect those populations of
wildlife and black bear? Or even flora and fauna? What do you as an
engineer, how do you respond to that? How do you accommodate for those
populations?

STAN HYATT:

Well, the environmental assessment of the project has been discussed by
biologists and people with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources
Commission that know much more about it than most of the highway people
do. They have data on bear, deer, all the wildlife and plants in that
area. It's not an easy thing to resolve. Of course, the old existing
highway—there has been mortality for bear up there. Just a month ago
there was a black bear run over on Sam's Gap, on the old road right
there. But it's more likely to happen with bigger faster speed highways
in one respect. The other respect is you have a lot more sight-distance
on the newer roads. The problem with the bear is they like to
travel—migrate—long distances. And they do a lot of that at night.
They'll cross those roads when it's dark foggy conditions, and the
motorists don't see them in time to swerve and get around them. We have
built the crossings. Or, we're in the process of building these
bear-crossings, which is a new concept to highway building, trying to
route the animals under the roads. I think other states have begun to
use it. I saw an article recently about an underpass in Florida for
reptiles—for alligators and turtles and things like that. So, the
highway building industry is trying to accommodate in every way that we can practically the animals that will cross and
migrate across the highways. We know that we're not going to be able to
get every animal across that highway safely. There'll be animals killed.
One thing we do, we put up controlled access fencing—chain-link or
woven-wire fencing, I should say, that's on both sides of the
interstate. We try to detour those animals away from the interstate with
that fencing. These underpasses that are for bear-crossings, the fencing
opens up and leads down to the inlet of that crossing. So it tries to
funnel the animal under the road. But right now I don't think there's
been enough statistics—enough studies done—to guarantee that that's
going to happen. I do know that these underpasses were designed over
five years ago, when we were designing I-26. And there have been newer
studies and newer designs different from the ones we're doing. Bigger,
wider openings and so forth, trying to every way possible encourage the
animal to go under the road instead of getting up on top of it. I don't
think the road in itself is going to bring about the extinction of the
Black Bear in this part of Madison County, but it will affect it. You
asked about the fauna. There will be some species in that area—that were
in the area of the footprint of the road—that won't be as prevalent.
Although, plants seem to—in a given area—seem to be easier to
accommodate than animals do. The things that are native. I don't
remember any endangered species, or even any potentially endangered
species in the path of the road that we think we would disrupt in that
area. There's still a lot of national forest area through there. The
Appalachian Trail and so forth, and I think those species will continue
in that area. But obviously we have taken out some of them to build the
road. I think they will colonize and come back on the right-of-way of
the road, eventually. There are some benefits to what we're doing. The
forest service in places goes in and does what they call clear-cutting
to establish new tender vegetation for deer in
certain areas, because underneath a big canopy of full-grown mature
trees you don't have that happen. We are planting things out there. It's
unbelievable the amount of new trees, new grasses, things—crowned vetch,
bi-colored lespidese, probably ten to twelve new species of grasses—that
we think the deer and the turkeys and the bear—I don't know about the
bear, but for sure the deer will love. We did some of that on 25-70 at
Hot Springs Mountain, and we've had good reports of the wildlife really
being in those areas. Of course, if you draw them to the food near the
road then there's more danger of them being hit there. But we are trying
to use this big bear area that's necessary for the road building to
regenerate wildlife in that area by our plantings. There may be some
changes. There may be some new species that like the road right-of-way
better—because of what we are planting there—than was there before. So
there's pro and con to all of this, obviously.

I want to jump back a little bit. You know we started our conversation
talking about your early life in Barnardsville; about your grandmother
walking to visit people, things like that. And obviously progress,
things change, the size of our culture, the size of our population has
grown. And this road is being built really to accommodate a lot of those
changes, and to really deal with the increased traffic and the size of
vehicles. You're obviously just very much a person who places value on
those older ways, on those older traditions, but also a person who is
modern enough—sophisticated enough—to recognize the need for these
roads. I'm curious between the contrast of the two. How do you think
about that? You can go to part of this county and still see people
walking, going to visit neighbors and things like that. But obviously
this road is a much different thing. It's much
different than that. Do you kind of mourn that loss, I guess? Is this
something that is difficult for you?

STAN HYATT:

Well I guess I would see myself as pragmatic, if that's the right word to
use. Number one, I don't see that I-26, the quarter, the new road that
we're building, will completely change the whole area of this part of
Madison County. The immediate footprint of the road, yes. It's obvious
it's changing. But I think that when you get back into the coves and the
valleys a mile a way from the road, you're still going to have the local
people living there and having their little worlds that will not change
drastically as a result of the road being over the mountain range from
where they live today. So I look at it from that respect. I do have a
problem in seeing a lot of trees cut down—forest land cut down. I love
the forest and the trees. To me, it's a sacrifice. I see it a whole lot
like going to the dentist when you have a tooth-ache, and the dentist
says, "You know, this is going to hurt a little bit, but after I get
through doing this things are going to be better." If I didn't feel that
overall the balance was tipped in favor of the road, I wouldn't
participate in it—if I thought it was overall a destructive thing that
was bad. To me, it's a balance. I look at dead trees on one hand; I look
at dead bodies on the other hand. All I have to do is go look at one
tractor-trailer rig at the base of Murray Mountain and see a fellow
decapitated or a woman all banged up like the lady. She wasn't killed a
couple weeks ago, but she may be paralyzed, or she may be broken up the
rest of her life and never walk again for all I know. She was in pretty
bad shape.

ROB AMBERG:

And that was so close to being a real disaster with school buses.

STAN HYATT:

School buses. There could have been a lot of tragedy there. So life is a
balance, and you take the good and the bad. And you have to make
choices. Life is full of choices, and this to me
was a choice. In my mind when I looked at the alternatives of leaving
traffic where it was, and realizing the importance of the road system, I
justified in my own mind. This road has to be built. When I look at it
from a quarter standpoint, a 600 mile road from Columbus, Ohio to
Charleston, South Carolina, I say, "Well, this is the only nine-mile
section that's not been built." If we didn't build it here, we would
have had to move it over into the next valley a half a mile over and
build it there. And we would have had these same type problems. It's
just a balance of choices that had to be made. In this case, I'm
comfortable with the fact—and I think I always will be—that we had to do
what we had to do. That we had to cut trees, and we had to put pipes in
where there were beautiful little streams with waterfalls. I didn't like
to do that! But I had to do it.

Here's a little metaphor. Looking down the road ten, twenty years from
now, what do you think the effect will be? Again, obviously, a lot of
these changes preceded even thought of the road. Or certainly any kind
of planning of the road. A lot of the demographic changes, the cultural
changes. Do you see the road as maybe accelerating some of those
changes? What will be the end effect of the highway? Other than,
obviously, the safety. That is so obvious to everyone, I think.

STAN HYATT:

I think there will be changes of some degree, adjacent to the road. I
think Madison County—the business people, the chamber of commerce
people—are hoping that it will bring some additional industry to the
county. As you know, the county right now has a population of less that
20,000, and if you go back and look at the census in 1940, it was
25,000. So the young kids are leaving Madison County. That in itself is
not good to preserve the old way of life if the generations are not
succeeding themselves, and the kids are getting up
high school, college age, and are leaving the county. So there's a lot
of hope that there will be some industry that will spring up because of
the increased access into the county. The county people have a
tremendous work ethic. I think they would be a tremendous work force for
any smaller industry—maybe fifty to 200 employee industry. Obviously,
you're not going to have DuPont come in and build a factory for 10,000
people; there's just not a big enough place for that. But I think the
smaller and the medium-sized industries—there will be some opportunity
there. And that's going to change. I think you'll see at each
interchange—and there's not that many. We're only building one new
interchange—at Bear Branch Road—until you get to Mars Hill. But around
those areas, you will see growth—rapid growth, I think—especially at
Bear Branch Road, it being adjacent to Laurel. I just can't foresee that
staying the way it is after that road opens. There will be some changing
adjacent to the road, but overall, I think the biggest potential for
Madison County in the area of change will be more housing. People are
not as reluctant to build on hillsides like they were before. As you
said, the old people built down in the valleys, along the creeks and so
forth. And now, it's nothing for a development to spring up. I hate to
see that in a way. But in a way, if Western North Carolina around
Asheville continues to grow, where is the movement going to be? Buncombe
County is pretty well filled up now. I think you're going to see growth
between Burnsville and Asheville, out in this area. And I have mixed
feelings. I hope we don't do like they did at Linville and build
seven-story ski slopes. I mean, seven-story motels [and] ski slopes on
top of the mountains, and change the ridge lines. You go over into
Asheville now; you look at Sunset Mountain there, and Beaucatcher, and
there're just houses everywhere. You can overdo anything, and from my
standpoint it doesn't bother me to see a few
houses and development on a mountain if you preserve the integrity of
the mountain. The beauty of the mountain. That's going to be up to our
county officials to address. I'm sure it'll be a hot topic into
ordinances and laws and so forth. One thing that I will say that I'm
very pleased—the League of Women Voters and county commissioners and
Town of Mars Hill were instrumental in preventing signing all over along
the interstate. They passed a sign ordinance. And there's even a move
now to try to expand that and get this section designated a scenic
highway. From a personal standpoint—not speaking as a DOT employee, but
for myself personally—I hope they can do that, because this is a
beautiful highway, and it links to another beautiful highway on the
Tennessee side. In my mind—I'm prejudiced, I know, because I'm involved
in the building of it—but I think it'll be as beautiful when it's
completed, as the parkway or anything in Western North Carolina for the
tourists that want to come here in the leaf season and just drive
through and look at the beauty of the countryside.

I went to a couple meetings of a sign ordinance commission down in
Marshall, and it was very interesting. There was a lot of people
speaking pro and con on that issue, and one of the main arguments for
people speaking for the signs—who wanted to be able to put signage
up—was of course, "Well this is my land, and it's adjacent to this
highway. I didn't really have a choice in terms of the highway coming
through. I was paid for my land and that kind of thing, and I want to be
able to use my land in any way I see fit. And that at this point would
include a huge billboard." It was interesting to me, because that
value—that idea of basically being able to do with your land whatever
you see fit—is a very, very old value in this community, basically one
that brought me to this community. I love the fact that "this is my
land. I can do whatever I want with it."

STAN HYATT:

You see more and more of that. I saw that in Buncombe County, in that
area that I was born in—Barnardsville area—with the county commissioners
wanting to restrict the use of the water in the creeks. And there's a
balance there that allows the property-owners some freedoms to do
basically what he wants to do with the property. But at the same time,
you have to be cognizant of the overall. To me, those billboards, the
way I've seen them in other parts of the country, would be a disaster
for the beauty of this road. I can understand the property-owner wanting
to make some money off of his mountain land that he can't do anything
else with up near the interstate. But when I look at the big picture,
and I look at the people in Madison County—the same people that want to
bring industry and tourism to the county—and then I put myself in the
place or in the car of that person from Michigan driving down here, and
I see all those billboards plastered, I don't know if I want to stop in
Madison County or not.

ROB AMBERG:

That's entirely the way I feel about it, too. At the same time, it's kind
of like this was—this place, I remember moving here and thinking, "Boy,
there is this kind of freedom that certainly doesn't exist in suburban
Washington, DC!" [Laughter]

STAN HYATT:

That's a part of the overall changing atmosphere you see.

ROB AMBERG:

Well, and like you say, I think there's good and pros and cons on all of
those things. And I do think that that is one of the pros in terms of
the changing cultural atmosphere. Twenty years ago there wouldn't have
been any discussion about that.

STAN HYATT:

It wouldn't even have been proposed to have a signing ordinance. But you
see what I see is abuse of that right. Madison County, before they
started the trash clean-up system—living over here, you saw the same
thing I saw. It was deemed a right to throw your trash out of your car
window on the highway. Before they had landfills and had garbage collection sites [you] just take your garbage to a
country road and dump it over a bank and into the creek. I mean, I
could've taken you up here to the highway project on US-23 up Little
Creek where there're washing machines, refrigerators. I spent a lot of
money, where we bought the property and moved the people out that lived
near that Little Creek area, to go in there and clean up after—clean
that garbage up. But that was their right to do that.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah. I live on a paved road over in the Little Pine section, and we have
a stretch of two, three miles of unpaved road that fronts our property.
It had been a historical dumping site for years. And the woman who owned
it finally hired somebody to pull all the metal out, stuff like that.
And then the trash ordinance came in, and we ended up turning a couple
people in who—you know, I'd go to the end of my drive way and see people
just backed up to the hillside.

STAN HYATT:

Well, is that right? Did they have the right to do that?

ROB AMBERG:

I don't think they do anymore. [Laughter]

STAN HYATT:

They thought they did!

ROB AMBERG:

But they certainly thought they did! And it was again, seemed like
something that was almost historical in nature.

STAN HYATT:

Well that's part of this overall changing aspect. 200 years ago you could
divide Madison County into little miniature counties. And that family
lived there, and they did what they wanted to and they really didn't
affect the other little counties adjacent to them.

And you know, the whole straight-piping issue is part of that kind of
thing. Again, when I moved here that was kind of the order of business.

STAN HYATT:

When we started this road up here, that was before this effort to clean
up the straight-piping. At that time, a survey was done—twenty-five
percent of the households of Madison County were straight-piped. So
you're talking about several thousand households putting their stuff
straight into the streams. Some of it were those streams up here now. It
was kind of an irony—and funny to some of us building the road—that we
had all these restrictions on us about putting silt in there. We went
out there and we found these pipes coming out of the houses straight
into the streams. And you'd hear a flush, and all at once you get this
deposit of waste material in this stream. If I dropped a tablespoon of
dirt in there and somebody saw me do it, I would get severely
castigated. That's part of the irony, but you look at the big picture.
Clean up that straight pipe, eliminate the signs, eliminate the dumping
the garbage over the hillsides. I think overall that's working out for
the better, for the overall betterment of the whole.

ROB AMBERG:

Right. One final thing is—and we've talked about this and kind of eluded
to it—and in a sense I think you've probably answered this, but I think
what I recognize is just the speeding up of everything. Everything is
getting faster. Obviously. And one of the things that I really cherish
about this place, and the particular place that I live is the—especially
compared to where I grew up. My parents live a mile from the DC beltway,
and I'm old enough to remember quite clearly what the place was like
before the belt-way came in. It was an area of smaller communities and a
lot of rolling hillside, that kind of thing. Of
course now, thirty-five years later, it's basically all condos and all
paved and things like that. And I'm not at all suggesting that Madison
County is going to turn into Silver Spring, Maryland. I don't think that
that will ever happen. But what I do sense is that there will be kind of
a speeding up of things. I'm not trying to intimate that the highway is
the cause of that, but it's almost like the highway is more symbolic of
that speeding up. As a person who was raised in that place in that time
when things where slow, when you could spend the day in the woods, when
you could walk to the neighbor's house and visit for the evening and
then walk back by flashlight—I don't know. It's like I feel like I'm
enough of a luddite to kind of really wish for those things. At the same
time, I've been here long enough to recognize that my drive to Asheville
has gone from an hour and fifteen minutes down to forty because of
25-70. I recognize my drive to visit my parents up in DC was eleven
hours when I first moved down here and is now less than eight and will
be less than that when the highway is completed. And yet like you say,
there's good and bad. And balance. You've used that word now a number of
times, and I think that that's critical. I think you're very perceptive
in seeing that. I'd like you to just talk a little bit about that. Talk
about that slow time. This is a really vague question, and I'm not even
sure what I'm asking in a sense.

Well, I think I understand what you're asking. People tend to fantasize
the best of what we've had in life and what we see in life. And I think
ideally we would live in a fantasy area or world where things don't
change. I can remember all those wonderful times growing up, being out
in the creek trout fishing, or eating popcorn in front of the fireplace
with Granny. I would like to preserve that. I'd like it to stay like that and never change. But that's not reality;
reality is things are going to change to some degree.

I'm hoping that Madison County—and I just differentiate between thinking
and hoping—but I'm hoping that Madison County does not change its basic
nature and character because of this road or anything else. I'm hoping
that there will be a time of stabilization where there will be enough
industry to attract the people that live in the county where the kids
don't move away [and] where it maintains its population. It has its own
individuality separate from Asheville or somewhere else. I don't know
what's going to happen in the future. I think there are natural
limitations on radical change. I think all it would take—even with this
road built and completed and everything—would be another major economic
hard time. A bad recession, depression or something like that. And then
all the building, the new fast foods and everything, just comes to a
crashing halt. All the realtors go out of business. I don't wish for
something like that, but realistically, we can't stay in this economic
period that we're in indefinitely. More than likely, we're going to have
our slower periods like we had in the 70s and 80s.

I think there's some natural limitations there. Where you live in Little
Pine, this road—I don't think you will see the affects of the road in
Little Pine, or even where I live on Bull Creek in Madison County. The
immediate area adjacent to the road I think will change. Who knows what
the overall change in the county will be; I don't have any idea. It's
hard to tell, but I don't envision or don't wish for an overly developed
Madison County. To me, that's a contradiction in terms. When I think of
Madison County, I think of rural beauty, mountains, not too many people.
I don't believe in my or your lifetime we're going to see a half million
people living in Madison County and everything
covered up. I think, though, there will be some changes. Some will be
good; some will be bad. That's the irony or the problem—the paradox, I
guess—with road building. We go in and we build a loop around the town
to handle the traffic problem. And then there's development all around
that outer belt, and then we have to build an outer-outer loop. Where is
the balance and all of that? Does the state—the DOT in particular—say,
"Well, we're just going to stop road-building."? I don't think that's
practical. I've actually had people at public hearings come and say—that
are really radical people—say, "We need to take up the roads we have now
and go back to the horse and buggy. Let's just plow the asphalt up. We
don't want a new road of any kind here, or anywhere else. Let's take
some of the roads that we can get rid of and just plow them up and plant
trees back there." To me, that's not practical. Nor is it practical to
say, "Let's just cut down all the trees and make roads everywhere."
There's a degree of practicality, of balance and everything. And I think
it's time that a road be built in this location. When I look at Madison
County, I look at the road system that we have here now, with the
addition of 25-70 that runs from Weaverville to Marshall to Hot Springs,
through that quarter. And with this new road, with 213 that was built
twenty years or so ago—or fifteen, whenever it was built—between Mars
Hill and Marshall—I don't see too much more major road building from
I-26 back to the west. Now the next thing that's going to change on the
far north of county is the upgrading of the 19 E quarter. That's going
to happen, and it's the same situation we're in with I-26. We have an
old road that was built years ago, and we have a big portion of the
population of Yancey County and Mitchell County also coming to Asheville
for work. They have a dangerous road now that just will not accommodate
the amount of traffic on it. So it's
dangerous. A better road can be built through that area. But it will
bring about change up through that valley.

That won't be an interstate-grade road, but that will be like a widening
of 19 E? Maybe straightening in parts of it?

STAN HYATT:

It will be both. It will not be designated an interstate, but it will be
closer to an interstate than it will just a four lane un-widened road.
It'll be built to newer standards for faster, safer traffic and so
forth.

ROB AMBERG:

But it won't be accessed—won't be as limited as it would be on an
interstate.

STAN HYATT:

I think it will be limited, but I don't know if they're going to build
frontage roads and build interchanges. More than likely not. I haven't
seen the planning for that road, or had a lot of discussion about it.
But I don't think it'll be left totally unlimited, either, where people
can just connect a driveway into it. I think there will be some control
on it. But once that road is finished, I don't see a whole lot more
major road building in Madison County for the next twenty or thirty
years. Now, I'm not a forecaster, and I don't look at these things and
study them and look at the growth patterns. Some people do, but I'm
trying to ask myself, "Where would you build another road in Madison
County?" You mentioned 25-70. I was involved in that road-building. And
I look at it. If you look at the portion from Weaverville down to
Marshall, for example, that road has been there now since.

ROB AMBERG:

‘82?

STAN HYATT:

'82. Eighty-three it was opened. Nearly twenty years. I don't think it
has changed the character of that area drastically. It probably is
accessible as far as the land area and the geography of the areas up
through here.

ROB AMBERG:

No, I think what we're seeing along that little corridor is—and again,
this has been probably in the last five to ten years—there is more home
construction. And I think that that is growth in Asheville, basically,
that's coming out to a more quiet rural area with
great—incredible—access into Asheville. As a person who—for the early
years I was here—traveled along the river, working jobs in Asheville or
something like that and traveling along the river, that road was an
absolute godsend. And at the same time, there is again that memory of
the old road and the thinking, "Well God, those were the good ole'
days." But the reality is, "Boy!" The time spent on the old road, the
danger of the old road. It was a scary time.

STAN HYATT:

A lot of accidents down there. A lot of people tumbled off the side of
the road. Young kid.

ROB AMBERG:

Into the river.

STAN HYATT:

The kids drinking and so forth.

ROB AMBERG:

The traffic moving really fast, too. I want to share with you,
though—I've been up certainly on the new highway many many times, and
I'm struck by—there's a couple locations. One is crossing Sam's Gap from
Tennessee, but also crossing Buckner Gap. I have to tell you that there
is this sense that the view—especially when you cross Buckner Gap—is so
absolutely incredible.

STAN HYATT:

When you can see this parkway mountain range?

ROB AMBERG:

You just see the whole southern mountains. It just opens up. I tell
people, I say, "You know, this is going to be a safer road. There's no
doubt in my mind." But I think that there's going to be accidents,
because people are just going to come across that gap and go, "[gasps]
and just be so taken with how beautiful it is."

STAN HYATT:

I agree with you. There was a lot of debate where we would put our
welcome center and our rest area, and a lot of people wanted it at the
state line up there. But the geographics were not such that we had a big
enough area up there. We would have had to go in and just level an
entire mountain. Twenty acres of a mountain. And you would have had a
real bungled up looking area by doing that even if we had the right of
way, which I guess we could have acquired it if we were just determined
to build it. But you had no view out of there! All you could see was the
adjacent hills, which are pretty, but you don't have that panoramic view
that you have from the area that you're talking about, just south of the
Buckner Gap cut. It's a shame that at that higher elevation we did not
have a place big enough there. But we're not but a mile below there.

It is the Babbit's property. We're going to build a scenic overlook area
there such that people coming in to rest can walk up a walkway, and
there's a knob there. There's a razorback mountain that comes out just
north of that orchard area. And it comes right down to the interstate,
but it's a little bit above the interstate. There's a huge oak tree
there, and we're going to build—actually build a platform area like a
deck area—that people can walk up that walkway. And from that you see
that whole panoramic view that you're talking about, including Mount
Mitchell. And then we're building another overlook for people coming
northbound just down below there that can see that view. But even going
out through that smaller cut down at the very bottom there at Jarvis
property—you go through it, and to me that cut just frames that
panoramic view. Of all the pictures I take, I probably have more that
I've taken at different times of that area, just because it just
perfectly frames all of that.

ROB AMBERG:

It frames it.

STAN HYATT:

But I think your perception that that's the view—it is, and I think
people are going to be stopping everywhere. One thing that I think needs
to be added to this discussion that we have not touched on before we end
up here—and I think this aspect of the view is going to bring it out—and
that's air quality. One thing I'm hoping is that when people see the
potential for views, and that you can go up there today when there's a
front moving through here in the winter time, and you can see everything
perfectly clear on a clear day. But in the middle of the summer with all
the haze and fumes that overhangs, air pollution and all—I'm hoping
that—as a builder involved in this road—that people will go up there and
they'll look, and they'll see the view when it's clear and they'll say,
"We want this year round." I know that's kind of paradoxical, because
people will say, "Well, why are you participating in the road-building,
because those cars are contributing to that air pollution." There will
be some of that. But I have to be optimistic enough to believe that the
technology can be developed to reduce that automobile pollution. I think
the major polluters are the industries up in the Ohio Valley and up
north of here.

ROB AMBERG:

And in Tennessee.

STAN HYATT:

I noticed when our governor was up here a couple months ago, and I got to
ride in the helicopter with him and be his tour guide for I-26—which was
an honor for me—but the reporter in the plane was asking him about the
air pollution laws. He signed new law in reducing pollution pretty
dramatically. It's not as much as everybody wanted, but I think there's
going to be more and more pressure to do that. What I'm saying is that I
hope that this scenic highway will be kind of a focal point. If people
are interested in bringing tourism into North
Carolina—people here in the leaf season and all—we're going to have to
get rid of that haze in the air, so they can see the mountains and see
the parkway.

ROB AMBERG:

And so just having the views that they have from the highway will
hopefully cause people to be a little bit more active proponents for
this. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And I think that that
makes some sense.

STAN HYATT:

You were going back to my childhood; I don't remember haze and pollution
back in the ‘50s when I was growing up around here.

ROB AMBERG:

Well, I guess Smokey Park was almost uninhabitable in different parts of
the summer just because of all the vehicles, and just with the inversion
of the air.

STAN HYATT:

Yeah, I've noticed a dramatic increase in the stuff lately, and
something's going to have to be done with it.

Well, I think Gary Walklin's wife had real issues with the air quality.

STAN HYATT:

Oh, she did. She did. She went back to Alaska because she said that she's
just allergic to everything around here. It was not only air pollution,
but a lot of things.

ROB AMBERG:

I emailed him a couple weeks ago and told him that she would have been
glad she wasn't here at the end of the summer as dry as it was around
here. This is a really bad year for all of that.

STAN HYATT:

I wish he was still here so you could do a full-scale interview. He was
one of the more interesting people I've ever had work for me.

ROB AMBERG:

Well I did about an hour and a half with him.

STAN HYATT:

Did you? That's good.

ROB AMBERG:

He felt a little bit scattered that day, so he and I are emailing back
and forth. I'm trying to get him to say, "Go ahead and use this for this
project." But he was concerned that he wasn't totally able to
concentrate. We were out on the job, and he was obviously needing to pay
attention to what was going on out there. But I find him to be just a
really interesting man.

STAN HYATT:

He was probably one of the most environmentally sensitive people that
have ever worked for me. And it worked extremely well. It was a godsend
for this job to have people like that, because we've gained a lot of
recognition for being environmentally sensitive in building this road. A
lot of it was because of people like Gary. There were tours where people
were brought up here from other areas of the state, and I've heard
people say, "Well if they can keep that stream clean here with those
huge slopes they're working on, then we can do it in Winston-Salem. Or
we can do it in Greensboro or somewhere else where they don't have near
the geography to have to deal with. But Gary, having spent most of his
career in Alaska, had to be—he was just ahead of us around this area. I
got tremendous ratings from the people that rated the job that he worked
on, for that reason.

ROB AMBERG:

That's great. I ended up swapping some photographs with him for a lot of
the lumber that he cut that he used to build his house. But he had a
pile of beautiful red oak flooring that I ended up swapping for. We just
converted the top half of our barn to some more workspace. And I'm in
the process of laying that flooring down now. This is going to be the
Gary Walklin floor in my barn now. [Laughter] It's great.

STAN HYATT:

You need to do what my neighbor who's deceased now did. He was an art
professor at the college here.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, I know Gordon.

STAN HYATT:

Well, he passed away with the cancer, but he purchased the property
adjacent to mine. When he purchased it before I did back—I guess it was
in the 60s or 70s—it had a tobacco barn on it. He looked at that barn,
and as an artist he could envision that being made into a household. He
didn't have the architectural background to know whether it was going to
be stable, but I think his father-in-law was an architect in New York,
and he brought him down here and they looked at that. He said, "Oh, this
is sound. Just leave all the poles and everything in there." So he
lacquered the tier-poles up through the middle of it. When you went into
Don's house in the living room, you'd see these poles that are lacquered
sticking up through. Of course, he made art studios, he had storage
space.

ROB AMBERG:

Our place is kind of typical of Madison County farms. It's 100 acres, but
it's only an acre of tillable ground and tobacco allotment. My wife and
I both raised tobacco in our years here, but we knew that was in the
past for us, certainly.